World: r3wp

I really hope so. I believe AGG offers a lot of font hinting options 
that we are not using at all.

From what I can tell, the renderer displays fonts similar to what 
Freetype could produce around 10 years ago. We can do much better 
today.

eh .... not good then. Due to AA fonts are now much better than in 
R2, but it seems like some small final touch is always needed ...

It is perhaps also because I'm used to OSX' (IMHO) superior font 
rendering.

Pekr: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

oh, seems like AGG is really a cool engine. So we are not utilising 
it full-force, right?

As far as I can tell, we are not using it 100%.

In any case, I think we all really appreciate and admire your work 
Henrik. The slider screenshots are simply awesome.

You're doing some really beautiful work.

Thanks :-)

I see it as how I would want it to work and look myself. That's the 
best motivation.

Absolutely. We're fortunate that you have not only technical ability, 
but aesthetic sense.

:-)

The ticks on the slider are generated by a function, and I can freely 
choose how many total ticks, how big and how many levels there are 
supposed to be. I expect to use this a great deal more.

The above font rendering article is great work, but unfinished. It 
requires further work on both AGG and FreeType

It would be great if that could be done in R3

It's one of the things I have been eying for Syllable

anyone know the status of the developer? it looks pretty quiet on 
the site.

(The AGG site, that is)

Status of AGG is not good for us. First, - we are using AGG 2.4, 
which was really free. From AGG 2.5, it changed to GPL, and as we 
know, GPL sux :-)

Currently AGG is at version 2.6 IIRC. It is not much developed, as 
Maxim Shemanarev (author) took some job oportunity.

But as Cyphre stated - 1) maybe we could get special licence, as 
there was good relation of RT and Maxim 2) we are far from fully 
utilising even 2.4 version ...

Henrik, do you also have "tree" lists?

I think no more styles are defined. Dunno if even general list is 
in there ...

Not that I am a super fan of the "+" and "-" but they are a very 
popular way to organize and present data.

There is no tree style yet.

I know.. what's with me and the "list" fixation? I wonder if it has 
to do with always trying to order my life. Actually, I thought that 
this is the first thing that my .Net friends are going to ask to 
see.

james - your request is along of mine request and another blog posters 
- we should not even dare to release without at least simple table, 
tree, tabs. I have two friends, who use REBOL for quick prototyping 
and connection to DB. One of them works with MS SQL. He creates quick 
tools to help him manage some jobs and some of his colleagues already 
asked about the tool. I really hope that for such guys (who are not 
interested to create widget themselves, but to use some ready-to-gon 
ones) we can come up with some data friendly widgets ...

Pekr, I'm pretty sure it's possible, just a little time consuming 
to build them.

Perhaps this is a good topic for a list of gadgets that are needed.

AGG is still at 2.5, a bugfix release. He never got as far as 2.6 
and hasn't updated in 2+ years.

pity AGG is no more developed. There is no other option currently. 
Everybody else uses Cairo, but this is crap with more than 1MB size. 
Amanith seems interesting too, but commercial. Hopefully Maxim updates 
AGG at least to keep the trends. But so far - AGG is very high quality, 
so nothing to worry about for quite some time....

Carl would offer him a job

The reason why he is not much active in AGG land is, that he already 
took some job.

I wonder how would AltME looked using new skin though. It would look 
like more typical OS app, and I might loose interest in it just because 
of that. What could be better is the keyboard support (in list, tabbing 
between panes, etc.). I think that special apps with special purpose 
in mind, will need special skins ...

don't focus on Altme,  keep using your brain for shared projects 
instead ;-)

Devabse need a good relooking too

Is hardware acceleration being considered at all for 2D rendering?

I suspect the answer to whether hardware acceleration will be provided 
will depend on whether AGG supports it. (I think not).

Pekr: I guess some of the crap in the IMB of Cairo is to support 
hardware acceleration and printing.

Peter - yes, it might be hw acceleration or printing. But - I think 
Carl would not like to have REBOL at 2 MB, at least not yet :-)

AdrianS: talked with Cyphre xy times. AGG does not support HW acceleration 
out of the box. But Cyphre plans to add it. Either as regular release, 
or as his own commercial project. Remember - whole View is going 
to be open-sourced. After all - it is mainly an AGG code plus events. 
There is a little bit problem with HW acceleration though - that 
stuff is not 100% compatible amongst the platforms - you might not 
get 100% pixel precise rendering ...

I think we still have some homework to do even in current state. 
What I think is suboptimal is timers. Fast View actions are still 
being a CPU hog. We discussed it several times, and I found some 
resources about timers. There are 4 - 5 types of timers in Windows 
itself, compatible with various Windows versions (or not). Windows 
is so much crap, that it does not support vertical blanking period 
=  forgot smooth not jerking not smeary animations, without DirectX.

It's funny that Maxim changed AGG to GPL for new development, then 
didn't do any.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/timers_intro.aspx

I think Queue timers might be good for us. Such low level changes 
might speed up View and make it more resource friendly. Not sure 
Carl wants to experiment, so maybe we will have to try once View 
is open-sourced.

I didn't think that View  was going to be open-sourced. I thought 
that it was inside the closed-source "kernel".

no, inside the closed source kernel is only rebol.dll = rebol interpreter. 
Things like threading, networking, events, view, everything else 
platform dependant is in host code. So - R3 is going to be some 80% 
open-sourced ...

Steeve: as for your note about not thinking only about AltME. I am 
going to look into MS OCS (Office communication server) for some 
inspiration in few months. I hope we can greatly improve AltME, or 
clone it, as we can't influence the code. E.g. IOS discussions allowed 
to post even drawings. We should think about sharing dashboards, 
video/audio codecs, etc., maybe even different organisation of "rooms" 
vs "groups", more threading capabilities to discussions etc.

AGG Versions: I really don't understand why Carl is not asking for 
a Rebol license? I'm doing this quite often for GPLed stuff and it's 
not big deal. Most authors are proud if what they have done and just 
want to avoid that the dark side is using their code.